


In From The Cold

by kiiouex



Category: A Dark Room (Doublespeak Games)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-14
Updated: 2015-03-14
Packaged: 2018-03-17 18:50:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3540245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A wanderer joins the village. It takes a while to adjust.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In From The Cold

**Author's Note:**

> -shrugs a lot- I just wanted to explore a little more of the 'stranger arrives in the night' and how they might fit in to the village, and what it might be like to live in that ambiguously-apocalyptic world.

She was getting sick of the sight of trees, and she was cold. There were furs in her pack and she had wrapped them around her as best she could, but she had long since lacked to tools to work them into something proper, to strip them and sew them and make them a coat or a blanket or anything better than dead animal skins strapped on as best as they can be.

She didn’t really have a name. Others called her a wanderer and she’d gotten used to being that. Wanderer was a popular name lately with so few places to settle. Word was people were working on something more permanent near the heart of the forest and she’d been working towards that for weeks, pushing through cold and beasts and endless trees to get there. She didn’t particularly want to settle, didn’t even think the settlement could last, but there was nothing she _did_ want to do. So she pushed on.

The sun died for the night and she knew it was time to climb a tree or get eaten, but a flickering light in the distance kept her on the ground. She pushed forwards quickly, ears open to the sound of snarls or claws or hunters approaching but there were no forest noises. There were people noises though, voices and fire crackling and even a laugh. It had been awhile since she’d heard one of those. She had been alone for a while.

She stood at the tree line, cut in a wide perimeter around a handful of wooden huts. They’d learned a little then, from the Eastern villages that had built right up to the trees and had people stolen through their windows at night. There were maybe twenty people gathered around the fire and it was the largest group she’d seen in a year. And their fire was warm. She was cold. She approached.

They fell silent as she walked up to their circle, some reached for crude spears, but she wasn’t entirely unwelcome. They were just being careful. They’d learned from that big Southern city that had been torn apart by strangers who just couldn’t bear it anymore.

She sat down in a space in the circle, not caring about them looking at her, not caring that she was an outsider, because the fire was warm and that’s all that was important. A woman got up, walked around to stand in front of her. The wanderer knew what she wanted and opened her pack, tipped out furs and teeth and scales and bones, all the bits of the bodies of creatures she couldn’t eat. The woman knelt and sorted the pile quickly, counting things up, before nodding, saying, “You’re welcome if you work.”

The wanderer knew how it went, but she hadn’t spoken in too long and didn’t want to try anymore. She nodded, and someone passed her a piece of meat, _cooked_ meat, warm and hot and she devoured it.

They gave her a berth in a room that still smelled like timber dust, it was so newly made and she fell into it without a care for the filth on her clothes. The rest of them stayed up longer, stoking the fire and talking and laughing and sounding happy in a way the wanderer hadn’t heard people sound in such an impossibly long time.

A woman got her up the next morning, the same one who’d taken her furs the night before. She was the leader, she said, and she and her builder wanted to make somewhere for people to live, like they had once, somewhere they could stay and be safe and happy. The wanderer tried to speak and her words came out in a horrible rasp. “I’ve heard this before.”

“I’m sure you have,” said the leader, not caring how many others had had the dream and failed. She and her builder were working hard, and the wanderer was welcome to stay too, if she worked.

They were cutting trees and it was hard, the wanderer was too thin and small and tired for the heavy labour, but they gave her the easy tasks to start, had her strip the bark from felled trees and she could do that, didn’t mind doing that, wouldn’t have minded doing anything for the hot meat they gave her that night.

The next day they set her to hunting and she was much better at that. She was naturally good, had long ago lost the parts of her that would have made it hard, could now stand still and silent and barely breathing and slash the throat of a creature before it knew she was there. It was hard to hand her meat over, her meat that she’d earned the right to eat, but they were sharing it out and the small portion they gave her back was perfect and cooked and served with foraged plants and she ate it all and wished for more. The leader tried to explain to her that regular meals would be better than gorging herself occasionally, and she knew the leader was right but it was hard to think that way when she watched others eating her prey.

They kept her on hunting and she kept being good at it. She brought meat home most days and the foragers gave her vegetables to go with it. They wanted to build farms but they needed more space, and the leader oversaw the felling of more trees, the clearing of more space, the construction of more huts.

Creatures came out from the trees but they had learned from the Western Villages that had been torn apart by them and knew how to fight, how to use nets and spears and take minimal damage and crush skulls underfoot and salvage all the fur and scales and teeth and meat.

More wanderers arrived, ragged and starved, and they were welcomed in just as she had been. Some stayed, some left. Some stayed and then disappeared in the night with as many furs as they could carry and the builder swore and the leader said that was just the risk they had taken. She had learned from the Northern villages, which were closed off and scared of strangers and dying a slow death from isolation.

The builder was clever and quiet and the leader was louder and smarter and knew how to manage people, knew how to balance everything so there was always enough food, always enough wood and space and houses, and more strangers came and the wanderer stopped being remotely new though she still didn’t talk when she didn’t have to. When people asked her about herself she said nothing because she had nothing to say; her story was the same as anyone else’s but she had forgotten huge chunks of it all and everything left was confusing. She was a wanderer, she would say, and she wasn’t so thin anymore, she shared her kills and had cooked meat every night and wasn’t so scared and wasn’t so ragged but her voice still rasped as she never talked.

The wanderer was accepted, not a stranger, people liked her and let her sit beside them without bothering to speak to her. Most thought she was mute and none of them minded, she brought in more meat than any other hunter and her berth was clean and tidy and the leader trusted her and the builder liked her and that was all that was really needed.

One day they got a stranger who knew how to make clothes, proper clothes, and the leader let them do just that, didn’t make the woman waste her fingers on woodcutting or bloodletting. They all shed their rags and wore proper clothes and looked like people again, and then the leader suggested they cut their hair and most did and then they weren’t just stragglers huddled around a fire they were people and they talked more and laughed more and called each other by name.

The leader asked the wanderer if she wanted a name and she stared at the leader for a while before she asked, “Do I need one?” in her strange rasping voice.

“Yes,” said the leader. “Maybe not for you, but we’d like to call you something other than Wanderer. You aren’t a wanderer anymore, after all.”

The wanderer thought about that and tried to count how much time had passed, how many days and weeks and months had slid past while she hunted and was warm, and she looked at how many more buildings there were and all the little farms and realized it was a settlement and she had settled.

She let the leader give her a name and she let the others call her by it. When she left the village it was only until she returned, because she needed to travel to the other villages, to the North and South and East and West and tell them about the village in the heart of the forest, so that they could learn from it.


End file.
